Americans don't like to be told what to do. Telling an American that "you must do X" is a sure way to invite an argument -- simply for argument's sake I think.
Pay taxes on stamps, tea, and sugar? Out went the British. Regulate alcohol? Whiskey rebellion and the first problem for the new government. Constitutionally prohibit alcohol (Prohibition)? Americans responded with Joe Kennedy and Al Capone. Sign says 55MPH? We'll drive 65MPH. Don't mandate what we can and cannot do.
When a vehicle, appliance, or other consumer-repairable needs repair and is all metric, we're more than willing to buy metric tools and deal with milimeters and kilograms. (7/16" wrench not quite fit? Ooops, metric. Try 11mm). In fact, the "handy" people I know (myself included) know almost instinctively when we'll be dealing with metric or imperial tools when fixing something.
For us, it's not easier or harder it's just different. Sell us a good metric product at a good price, and we'll buy it. We'll even buy the metric tools to fix it.
We're even willing to do the mental math to convert when we have to. Most Americans I know take a few moments to adjust to Canada and their metric ways. In a few moments over the border they'll know how many miles it is from Windsor to Toronto, how many gallons of gas it'll take, how fast they can drive, and what the gas'll cost to get there.
But we're also comforted in knowing that if we build something from scratch we're dealing in imperial units. Raw materials are almost always imperial. Lumber by the foot, tools measured in inches (or fractions), nails in pounds, joint compound in gallons, and carpet by the square yard.
We'll give lame excuses ("12 can be divided by 2, 3, 4, and 6!") and invent all kinds of mnemonics to help ("pint's a pound, the world around!")..
"Hi, my name is clintp. I'm a programmer and I suck at math."
I nearly flunked Calculus (didn't help that it was an 8am class) and linear algebra drove me insane. The basics I have down very well (algebra, statistics, trig, etc..) but the more advanced stuff...yech.
It hasn't seemed to hurt my career in the IT field at all. I'm earning well over $100k/year in the US Midwest (not known for good salaries) doing rather interesting work.
What *did* help a lot was taking some accounting as well as math. In my particular background of business programming, it's been a lot more useful to know how Accounts Receivables aging works than to be able to calculate the area under a curve. And even if you're not writing any accounting related code, it's still useful to know how your business unit works.
The core of the.NET Framework, and what has been patented by Microsoft falls under the ECMA/ISO submission. Jim Miller at Microsoft has made a statement on the patents covering ISO/ECMA, (he is one of the inventors listed in the patent): here [the link is incorrect -- clintp].
Basically a grant is given to anyone who want to implement those components for free and for any purpose.
Hey... MY name is David, and I don't appreciate it being associated with some windows crap. Can I sue them for using my intellectual property?
Michaelangelo already has a trademark for "David" for use with architectural elements such as windows as his statue was intended to sit atop a building. If you'd like to discuss terms for licencing, talk to his agents the Medici family. If you survive... err.. dislike the terms, feel free to change your name to Mud or some such.
you will never see a holstein "in the wild" because modern cows are the creation of human agriculture. they exists because we demand that they do. and we are responsible for their belches. and their manure. and the soile they erode.
It sounds to me like we've simply replaced the bison, mammoth, elk, deer, etc... with other animals.
So in essence it's the same gas as thousands of years ago, it's just that now it's being spewed by cattle and environmentalists.
A lot of them just don't see the point of passwords. After explaining that this is to secure company data against corporate theft, hackers, etc.. they rightfully counter with:
"Well, since we're always having viruses, trojans, spam, popups, crashes, and other unwanted crap on our networks... do the passwords really make that much difference?" Why worry about the door keys when the windows are open?
Maybe when the admin's (& the business') house is in order, we've got some right to bitch about users and passwords.
It's not impossible at all, in fact any car will run without oil. Not for very long though.
The trick is keeping it cool -- tough to do, since oil is esential to the cooling system. It'll run till the pistons or a lifter/tappet gets hot enough to seize the surrounding bore, the head warps and you lose pressure, or you can't stand the screaming of the crankshaft bearings any longer.
20 year programming veteran, from embedded systems, drivers, OS's, up to application and systems management code with everything in between. I'll give an unsolicitied Voice of Experience (as the author calls it) about an unsuccessful attempt at XP:
When XP showed up in our shop it was at a suggestion from the new CTO. Should we do it? Why not? We talked to some consultants about it -- and that's where the wariness set in.
The programmers embraced it for the first year or so. We had good reason to, as it was the only way we could cajole customers (internal personnel) into giving us good problem descriptions. Any methodology was better than no methodology.
The customers complained that the coach was getting in the way of getting problems solved (and he was). The methodology itself was seriously getting in the way of things getting done.
We went from Quarterly development cycles to Bi-weekly. The customers howled in pain, even though the bug count was dropping significantly.
Unit tests never really happened (and yes, the XP-heads will point and scream "THAT'S WHY XP FAILED!" I'm sure). We were working on adding features and bug fixes to a 20-year-old product that strongly resists any attempts at automation or limited unit tests -- caution, experience, and good source control saves our bacon daily.
Pairing... We had 6 programmers, so pairing all-day every day became tiring. So we cut back on the pairing hours. And it was still tiring. And after a couple of rotations, we stumbled on lots of pairings that just didn't work. So with programmers C, W, B, K, P, A the only pairs that worked were CW, CB, CP, WB, WA, BA, and KA. Most of our pairings were expert-expert pairings as far as programming abilities, but in subject matter they ranged from expert to novice.
A lot of knowledge transfer happened during pairing, but a lot of productivity was lost. And the complaints about not being able to tinker and study code to learn from it abounded.
Myself, I thought the whole experience was worth a try. What doesn't kill us can only make us stronger, right? The CTO is gone now and with it most of the methodology.
What we've ditched: * Pair programming, except as a knowledge transfer tool on new code. * The Coach. * Replaced the "stories" with a good bug tracking system.
What we kept: * Somewhat shorter development & release cycles * The dream of good unit tests * 100lbs of books on XP. * Large workstation screens.
Re:Sheesh!
on
TiVo Will Die
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
At least as far back as 1985 they were joking about the mantra "Death of the Net Predicted". Probably longer, but this is as far back as I could entice Google Groups to go.:)
A SAM hitting an airplane does a lot of damage from hitting a rigid, delicate structure with a lot of mass moving at a high velocity (both it and the target).
The velocity and mass simply isn't there in a lighter-than-air craft of this size. (Well, the mass is but it's spread over a huge area.) This is like shooting a.50 caliber weapon at the Sta-Puf Marshmallow Man. Proper fireproofing, flexible partitions between segments, shrapnel-puncture resistant panels between major sections would resist most single-strikes of any weapon capable of reaching 70K feet.
So long as the electronics were hidden, shielded, or replicated throughout the volume the craft would be difficult to take down or fatally damage.
My registrar just went out of business. Of course before they did, mysteriously, all of the contact information -- except billing -- was switched to them. And so I've got a couple of stranded domains that I can't move anywhere, at any price.
Proving "ownership" is turning out to be harder than expected.
I've done this quite a few times, posted to alt.hackers about it in 1997. Ovens work really well too, just heat the drive up to about 150 degrees or so. You want it hot enough to be uncomfortable to hold, but not hot enough to melt the electronics. Toaster ovens work but beware of how close the heating elements are.
This is most useful on drives that have died of stiction, where the drive motor doesn't have enough torque to overcome the gummed up lubricants and worn bearings.
Programmers get irritated with management, sales, supervisors, and especially users when they can't write a specification for us to write programs. We bitch because they're vague and contradictory. They change their minds, can't decide what they want, and try to please all the wrong people with all of the wrong features.
As someone who empathises with users trying to get a workable program, these kinds of license wars crack me up. The next time you complain about the spec being inadaquate or changing: remember that programmers too are mostly incapable of expressing what they want in English and pleasing all of their masters.
The problem could easily be solved with little raised bumps on the 4-way pad (similar to the one found on the channel up/down button, maybe larger). I'm surprised they didn't do that because having the TiVo's orientation just right is essential for the 4-way to work.
On other threads: I've never had a problem with the orientation of the remote. The "TiVo" button at the top is usually my first clue, even in the dark. Perhaps I just have sensitive hands (listen up, girls!).
My son and I did pretty much destroy the first TiVo remote we had though. Both of us kept playing with the battery cover, and eventually the tabs broke off and it had to be taped on. Then a few weeks later the TiVo button's plastic cap (which kept snagging on things) broke off.
The replacement remote's ($35!) TiVo button seems to have a lower profile. Now if it only had a screw holding on the battery cover I'd feel safe...
As an astrophysics student at a government-funded university, I certainly think it should be the government's job.
As a taxpayer (who subsidises government-funded universities) I think the government's involvement should be limited to perhaps providing small subsidies to private corporation R&D budgets (tax breaks) in exchange for creating technology.
Let the markets determine where the research should go, but provide encouragement to keep the products of the research in the public domain (or at least cheaply licensed). I'm not expecting Monsanto or ADM to grab at this opportunity wholeheartedly, but smaller companies or divisions of larger ones might grab at the tax break for research that's important but not at the core of their business model.
OK, I've never quite understood sales taxes to begin with.
The way I've always had it described to me is that sales taxes are how a state can raise funds proportional to its economy.
Sales taxes are one of the most practical ways of doing this. Determining taxes at the point of manufacture is dicey (when is an automobile really "built"? when the engine is inserted? what's a car without bumpers really worth?) and collecting taxes during wholesale is impractical because goods can be transferred more than once among wholesalers.
But at the point of sales it's easy: there's a fixed price, discreet items being sold, a single transaction, and the state collects the taxes from the retailer so the consumer doesn't have to keep records or be relied on to report the transaction. And since retailers are generally licensed, the state knows who they are.
They're a pain in the ass for retailers to keep track of, because typically some items are non-taxable (food, services, clothes, varies from taxing authority to taxing authority) and some consumers are exempt from sales taxes (churches, gub'mint buyers, again varies...etc). Back in the 80's I was writing Point Of Sales software, and this stuff made it a lot more complex than it needed to be.
[Personally, I can't stand sales taxes. Michigan had a 4% sales tax, and for some screwball reason raised it to 6% about 10 years ago. Foolish voters. (I was a non-resident at the time.)]
Slashdot Mirror
Dear Penthouse Letters,
....
I never thought I'd be writing to you, but
Maybe he could have gotten in on the Great Parrot/Python Pie-a-Thon. Perhaps an opportunity to plaster both Guido and Dan with a cream pie...
(Referring to Sideshow Bob)
Bart: He's planning something evil, I know it. It must have something to do with the town's water supply.
Milhouse: Maybe he's gonna pee in the river!
Bart: Mmm, nah, that's not his style.
"Brother from Another Series", from snpp.com
Your relative just isn't smart. That can't be helped in *any* measurement system.
For most long distance trips I figure 60 miles/hour on average (I drive fast, my kid needs stops). That works out to... a mile a minute.
More precision. Calculate that.
Americans don't like to be told what to do. Telling an American that "you must do X" is a sure way to invite an argument -- simply for argument's sake I think.
Pay taxes on stamps, tea, and sugar? Out went the British. Regulate alcohol? Whiskey rebellion and the first problem for the new government. Constitutionally prohibit alcohol (Prohibition)? Americans responded with Joe Kennedy and Al Capone. Sign says 55MPH? We'll drive 65MPH. Don't mandate what we can and cannot do.
When a vehicle, appliance, or other consumer-repairable needs repair and is all metric, we're more than willing to buy metric tools and deal with milimeters and kilograms. (7/16" wrench not quite fit? Ooops, metric. Try 11mm). In fact, the "handy" people I know (myself included) know almost instinctively when we'll be dealing with metric or imperial tools when fixing something.
For us, it's not easier or harder it's just different. Sell us a good metric product at a good price, and we'll buy it. We'll even buy the metric tools to fix it.
We're even willing to do the mental math to convert when we have to. Most Americans I know take a few moments to adjust to Canada and their metric ways. In a few moments over the border they'll know how many miles it is from Windsor to Toronto, how many gallons of gas it'll take, how fast they can drive, and what the gas'll cost to get there.
But we're also comforted in knowing that if we build something from scratch we're dealing in imperial units. Raw materials are almost always imperial. Lumber by the foot, tools measured in inches (or fractions), nails in pounds, joint compound in gallons, and carpet by the square yard.
We'll give lame excuses ("12 can be divided by 2, 3, 4, and 6!") and invent all kinds of mnemonics to help ("pint's a pound, the world around!")..
But the truth is we like it this way, thank you.
"Hi, my name is clintp. I'm a programmer and I suck at math."
I nearly flunked Calculus (didn't help that it was an 8am class) and linear algebra drove me insane. The basics I have down very well (algebra, statistics, trig, etc..) but the more advanced stuff...yech.
It hasn't seemed to hurt my career in the IT field at all. I'm earning well over $100k/year in the US Midwest (not known for good salaries) doing rather interesting work.
What *did* help a lot was taking some accounting as well as math. In my particular background of business programming, it's been a lot more useful to know how Accounts Receivables aging works than to be able to calculate the area under a curve. And even if you're not writing any accounting related code, it's still useful to know how your business unit works.
For this it states:
Not to mention flight delays (of years sometimes), cancelations, and the occasional destination changes (landing at Florida instead of California).
You forgot the obligatory *clickety-click* in there somewhere. And then offer to help with her disk space...
It sounds to me like we've simply replaced the bison, mammoth, elk, deer, etc... with other animals.
So in essence it's the same gas as thousands of years ago, it's just that now it's being spewed by cattle and environmentalists.
A lot of them just don't see the point of passwords. After explaining that this is to secure company data against corporate theft, hackers, etc.. they rightfully counter with:
... do the passwords really make that much difference?" Why worry about the door keys when the windows are open?
"Well, since we're always having viruses, trojans, spam, popups, crashes, and other unwanted crap on our networks
Maybe when the admin's (& the business') house is in order, we've got some right to bitch about users and passwords.
It's not impossible at all, in fact any car will run without oil. Not for very long though.
The trick is keeping it cool -- tough to do, since oil is esential to the cooling system. It'll run till the pistons or a lifter/tappet gets hot enough to seize the surrounding bore, the head warps and you lose pressure, or you can't stand the screaming of the crankshaft bearings any longer.
And then it may never run again.
20 year programming veteran, from embedded systems, drivers, OS's, up to application and systems management code with everything in between. I'll give an unsolicitied Voice of Experience (as the author calls it) about an unsuccessful attempt at XP:
When XP showed up in our shop it was at a suggestion from the new CTO. Should we do it? Why not? We talked to some consultants about it -- and that's where the wariness set in.
The programmers embraced it for the first year or so. We had good reason to, as it was the only way we could cajole customers (internal personnel) into giving us good problem descriptions. Any methodology was better than no methodology.
The customers complained that the coach was getting in the way of getting problems solved (and he was). The methodology itself was seriously getting in the way of things getting done.
We went from Quarterly development cycles to Bi-weekly. The customers howled in pain, even though the bug count was dropping significantly.
Unit tests never really happened (and yes, the XP-heads will point and scream "THAT'S WHY XP FAILED!" I'm sure). We were working on adding features and bug fixes to a 20-year-old product that strongly resists any attempts at automation or limited unit tests -- caution, experience, and good source control saves our bacon daily.
Pairing... We had 6 programmers, so pairing all-day every day became tiring. So we cut back on the pairing hours. And it was still tiring. And after a couple of rotations, we stumbled on lots of pairings that just didn't work. So with programmers C, W, B, K, P, A the only pairs that worked were CW, CB, CP, WB, WA, BA, and KA. Most of our pairings were expert-expert pairings as far as programming abilities, but in subject matter they ranged from expert to novice.
A lot of knowledge transfer happened during pairing, but a lot of productivity was lost. And the complaints about not being able to tinker and study code to learn from it abounded.
Myself, I thought the whole experience was worth a try. What doesn't kill us can only make us stronger, right? The CTO is gone now and with it most of the methodology.
What we've ditched: * Pair programming, except as a knowledge transfer tool on new code. * The Coach. * Replaced the "stories" with a good bug tracking system.
What we kept: * Somewhat shorter development & release cycles * The dream of good unit tests * 100lbs of books on XP. * Large workstation screens.
At least as far back as 1985 they were joking about the mantra "Death of the Net Predicted". Probably longer, but this is as far back as I could entice Google Groups to go.:)
A SAM hitting an airplane does a lot of damage from hitting a rigid, delicate structure with a lot of mass moving at a high velocity (both it and the target).
.50 caliber weapon at the Sta-Puf Marshmallow Man. Proper fireproofing, flexible partitions between segments, shrapnel-puncture resistant panels between major sections would resist most single-strikes of any weapon capable of reaching 70K feet.
The velocity and mass simply isn't there in a lighter-than-air craft of this size. (Well, the mass is but it's spread over a huge area.) This is like shooting a
So long as the electronics were hidden, shielded, or replicated throughout the volume the craft would be difficult to take down or fatally damage.
A paper bag full of potato chips work wonderfully and don't smell nearly as bad when burning.
Never attribute to malice that which can adaquately be explained by stupidity.
My registrar just went out of business. Of course before they did, mysteriously, all of the contact information -- except billing -- was switched to them. And so I've got a couple of stranded domains that I can't move anywhere, at any price.
Proving "ownership" is turning out to be harder than expected.
I've done this quite a few times, posted to alt.hackers about it in 1997. Ovens work really well too, just heat the drive up to about 150 degrees or so. You want it hot enough to be uncomfortable to hold, but not hot enough to melt the electronics. Toaster ovens work but beware of how close the heating elements are.
This is most useful on drives that have died of stiction, where the drive motor doesn't have enough torque to overcome the gummed up lubricants and worn bearings.
Programmers get irritated with management, sales, supervisors, and especially users when they can't write a specification for us to write programs. We bitch because they're vague and contradictory. They change their minds, can't decide what they want, and try to please all the wrong people with all of the wrong features.
As someone who empathises with users trying to get a workable program, these kinds of license wars crack me up. The next time you complain about the spec being inadaquate or changing: remember that programmers too are mostly incapable of expressing what they want in English and pleasing all of their masters.
The problem could easily be solved with little raised bumps on the 4-way pad (similar to the one found on the channel up/down button, maybe larger). I'm surprised they didn't do that because having the TiVo's orientation just right is essential for the 4-way to work.
On other threads: I've never had a problem with the orientation of the remote. The "TiVo" button at the top is usually my first clue, even in the dark. Perhaps I just have sensitive hands (listen up, girls!).
My son and I did pretty much destroy the first TiVo remote we had though. Both of us kept playing with the battery cover, and eventually the tabs broke off and it had to be taped on. Then a few weeks later the TiVo button's plastic cap (which kept snagging on things) broke off.
The replacement remote's ($35!) TiVo button seems to have a lower profile. Now if it only had a screw holding on the battery cover I'd feel safe...
Let the markets determine where the research should go, but provide encouragement to keep the products of the research in the public domain (or at least cheaply licensed). I'm not expecting Monsanto or ADM to grab at this opportunity wholeheartedly, but smaller companies or divisions of larger ones might grab at the tax break for research that's important but not at the core of their business model.
Sales taxes are one of the most practical ways of doing this. Determining taxes at the point of manufacture is dicey (when is an automobile really "built"? when the engine is inserted? what's a car without bumpers really worth?) and collecting taxes during wholesale is impractical because goods can be transferred more than once among wholesalers.
But at the point of sales it's easy: there's a fixed price, discreet items being sold, a single transaction, and the state collects the taxes from the retailer so the consumer doesn't have to keep records or be relied on to report the transaction. And since retailers are generally licensed, the state knows who they are.
They're a pain in the ass for retailers to keep track of, because typically some items are non-taxable (food, services, clothes, varies from taxing authority to taxing authority) and some consumers are exempt from sales taxes (churches, gub'mint buyers, again varies...etc). Back in the 80's I was writing Point Of Sales software, and this stuff made it a lot more complex than it needed to be.
[Personally, I can't stand sales taxes. Michigan had a 4% sales tax, and for some screwball reason raised it to 6% about 10 years ago. Foolish voters. (I was a non-resident at the time.)]